Cannibal Corpse, M/C

So he stopped, a wild and raging voice in his brain asking: why the hell are you running anyway? This is what you came to see.

That was true.

Now nothing was following him. He stood there in a black wind of gritty crematorium ash and bone dust, thinking, trying to make sense of it all and knowing it was senseless but maybe not entirely.

This is the place you found when you went down the rabbit hole, he understood. This was it. A killing ground, or maybe the place where killing was born, the epicenter of violent death. Yes, that was it. That made perfect sense to his tripping/soaring mind.

He looked around.

He knew this was a place to fear. But he had not come here to be afraid, he had to learn, to, to know.

“Knowledge is the razor that slits your throat,” a voice said.

Slaughter turned and there was Black Hat, his white face almost luminous, his dead salmon eyes bright. “John Slaughter,” he said. “My favored son. What dealings we have had through the years! What heights we reached together! But our work is not yet done. Listen: there was once a king who killed indiscriminately. He had himself a wife, did this king. She was low and crude, a slatternly Judy was she. The king grew tired of her so he stuffed her like a tripe with bushels, pecks, and pipkins of loathing, falsehood, steaming servings of excrement. When his fatted calf was quite full, near to bursting, he offered her up to the soldiers of a dark kingdom, mercenaries and throat-slitters, gut-stabbers and belly-eaters, seed-spillers and blood hands. They ate of her and found her pleasing. The king, at any time, could have saved his fair wench, she of the hungry holes, his whore-bride fishwife, his vixen ogress. But he found amusement in her undoing and laughed did he as the soldiers filled themselves with her. Only at her moment of greatest defilement and violation did he step in and take the lives of the soldiers. But then it was too late, kind sir: for the clay, once cold, was not to be molded by mortal hands and the skein, once unwound, was not to be threaded by guilty fingers. Eh? Do you see, John?”

“You’re talking about Dirty Mary. How I could have saved her.”

“Excellent! There is meat between yon ears, not just dull gray sludge but pink dreaming meat!” said Black Hat. “Perhaps there was a parable in that story after all. I cannot tell you the how of the why and the how of the how but I can show you the ending of the game, the scene upon which the final curtain draws…”